Online and Incremental Appearance-based SLAM in Highly Dynamic Environments

In this paper we present a novel method for online and incremental appearance-based localization and mapping in a highly dynamic environment. Using position-invariant robust features (PIRFs), the method can achieve a high rate of recall with 100% precision. It can handle both strong perceptual aliasing and dynamic changes of places efficiently. Its performance also extends beyond conventional images; it is applicable to omnidirectional images for which the major portions of scenes are similar for most places. The proposed PIRF-based Navigation method named PIRF-Nav is evaluated by testing it on two standard datasets in a similar manner as in FAB-MAP and on an additional omnidirectional image dataset that we collected. This extra dataset was collected on 2 days with different specific events, i.e. an open-campus event, to present challenges related to illumination variance and strong dynamic changes, and to test assessment of dynamic scene changes. Results show that PIRF-Nav outperforms FAB-MAP; PIRF-Nav at precision-1 yields a recall rate about twice as high (approximately 80% increase) than that of FAB-MAP. Its computation time is sufficiently short for real-time applications. The method is fully incremental, and requires no offline process for dictionary creation. Additional testing using combined datasets proves that PIRF-Nav can function over the long term and can solve the kidnapped robot problem.